


Star Pupil

by eliddell



Category: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen
Genre: Body Swap, F/M, Genderbending, Masturbation, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 03:11:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5692405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eliddell/pseuds/eliddell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Azalie had always loved Childman.  Even after she decided she had no choice but to destroy him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Star Pupil

**Author's Note:**

> This is another old 'fic I'm reposting just for the heck of it. It was originally written for a multi-fandom mailing list. It fits into the continuity of the first anime series—I'm not sure I even knew there was a manga when I wrote it.
> 
> Original author's note from 2002 follows (although I am not going to include the summary of the Orphen anime that originally went with it):
> 
> \--------------------------------
> 
> This is the first thing that I've been able to write in . . . quite a while . . . and I hope it's turned out better than my subconscious is trying to tell me that it has.
> 
> Anyone who has ever seen [Sorcerous Stabber/Matsujutsushi] Orphen will probably be able to identify the scene during which this takes place--it's the bath scene in the episode after the one where Orphen and company are fooling around with the moondial. Masturbation, very weird gender-bending stuff, slightly crazy narrator, lots and lots of spoilers for the later episodes of Orphen.
> 
> \--------------------------------

The moon really is beautiful tonight, just as it was two days ago when I escaped that filthy shell in which I had been confined for so long, but looking at it holds no pleasure for me. The moon was out on that night ten years ago, too, when I let my broken heart get the better of me . . . No, best not to think of that. Concentrate on the warmth of the water here in the bath. This is the first time in a decade that I have been able to feel a sensation as subtle as _warm_ or _wet_ , and I can't help but voice my appreciation out loud. Bloody August's scaly hide was too thick for me to detect anything through it but pain. 

It's fascinating, the sensations that the water creates as I let it run across the palm of my hand and drip through my fingers. And if the hand isn't quite right, if it's bigger than it should be, the knuckles more prominent, well, the truth is that I barely notice it. It's difficult to remember, after all this time, what my real body looked like or felt like . . . and in any case, this was the body that I always longed to touch. 

I suppose it's normal for a little girl to have a crush on her teacher—in fact, it's probably all but inevitable when that teacher is ruggedly handsome and barely ten years older than she is, and gentle and kind and a genuinely _nice_ person, far too nice to be an instructor in black magic at the Tower of Fangs . . . or so I thought then. Before you tried to kill me. 

That's all you thought it was, didn't you, Childman? A crush. Silly adolescent foolishness that, in time, I would outgrow. I would . . . still like to believe that if you had realized the depth of my feelings, you wouldn't have given me that particular lecture that day in the courtyard, or left me there to cry out my disillusionment while my heart turned to ice in my breast and that poor flower withered on the cold stones at my feet. 

I was hurt, and confused. And now that we are, in some bizarre sense, united, I still feel hurt and confused. It wasn't supposed to be this way. It was never supposed to be this way. I never meant to do this to you . . . to us. 

I will never kiss you now. I will never feel your arms around me, unless I choose to embrace myself. You are no longer here inside this body, and the reflection of your face mocks me from the surface of the water. 

. . . The eyes that look back at me are my own, red-brown, not the blue that I remember. Why did it take me this long to notice that? They make all of this even more false, dreamlike, and wrong, and I am almost thankful when a tear trickles down my face and the spreading ripples as it falls into the water destroy the reflection. 

I will not look again. If I do, it will only cause me more pain. And so I keep my eyes closed as I tilt my head back. I can feel the thick silk of your hair, water-soaked at the tip, slithering back across my shoulders. Strange—I never had hair this long, even before the Tower's regulations required me to cut it, and it's going to take some getting used to. I loosen the tie at the nape of my neck, and it falls free, blanketing my back. 

So. Let me touch you this once, feel you just this once, before I lock that dream up in the cellars of my mind where dreams that can never come to pass belong. Before I go out to kill the real you, and destroy even the shadow of that dream forever. 

I can feel my hands snag on odd strands as I run them through your hair. Strange, that a man should have hair so thick and fine and soft. I always imagined, when I dared imagine anything at all, that it would be coarser. 

Tentatively, I raise my hands to your face, brush them over the closed eyes, the strong lines of brow and cheekbone and jaw and chin. You were never as pretty as a Krylancelo, but it was the strength of you that I loved, the strength that your seemingly gentle nature never entirely hid . . . the strength of your body and the strength of your magic. I can feel your power pulsing inside me now, twining up and down my spine, with larger concentrations of it swelling behind my eyes, under my breastbone, and just below my navel. So much . . . I never realized that you had so much. 

I brush my fingers over your lips in a caress, and in response, a strange, fluttery sensation moves through my body. I let my hands follow it, down your jaw and your throat to your chest. My own body had softer, curved flesh there, not firm muscle. So strange . . . so beautiful. I can see it, see _you_ , even with my eyes closed. I wish . . . oh, how I wish . . . 

Now I am touching portions of your body that I had never seen until I stripped to enter the bath. Abdomen, navel, buttocks, hips, thighs. Not that one special place yet—I intend to save that for last—but I find myself thinking about it as my hands drift further down, caressing knees and calves and, finally, feet. Skin on skin . . . how long has it been since I last touched someone this way? 

After a moment, I let my hands move upward again, stopping them at the point where hip joins thigh, and then letting them skim forward until they meet in front, trying not to remember the dreams I had about the first time you would let me touch you this way, or my own strange and confused expectations of what it would be like. The curriculum at the Tower of Fangs seeks to educate the student in matters of sorcery, not matters of life, and so all I know about what a man does with a woman has been gleaned from things that the other female students said in my hearing. I've heard so many contradictory things—that it hurts, that it doesn't hurt, that it feels so good that you don't mind it hurting—and my explorations of my own body were never conclusive in that regard. There were things I could have done to alleviate my ignorance, I suppose, but the thought of experimenting that way with the other students always disgusted me. It was only you that I ever wanted. 

Is this what it feels like for a man, then? This slow-building, throbbing, pleasurable ache? This swelling stiffness pressing against the palm of my hand? It's . . . so good . . . I don't understand why you pushed me away, if this is how being touched by me would have made you feel. Or are you like the ones I heard the others talk about in less-than-whispers? Would it have been Krylancelo or Hartia that you would have wanted to feel touch you this way? No, I can't believe that. I won't. Somehow I need to preserve that one last scrap of illusion about who you are, about what we might have been. 

So strange and intense . . . I can almost feel every pore in my fingers against that sensitive flesh. It's like . . . I don't know . . . it's like . . . 

_Ooooooh._

And as I finally open my eyes again, the water is cloudy, any reflections it might otherwise have contained hidden by that imperfection. Your hands rest palm-down on the surface, and I find myself staring at them. 

These hands will never touch me in the way that I have always desired except when I act to create a silly little illusion for myself, the way I've just done. It . . . I can't . . . 

I loved you, I know I did. Could you have loved me in return, if I had been stronger, more patient, less foolish? If I had waited to come to you until I was already a sorceress in my own right, instead of your student? 

The water is clearing again, and the eyes of my reflection are blue. I can almost imagine the image is yours as you look over my shoulder, and for a precious moment I give in to the fantasy. For just an instant, it's almost real. Then I lean back and feel only smooth tile against my skin, not flesh, and my poor pathetic little dream shatters. Again. 

Pathetic. Yes, that's the word I wanted. A pathetic, silly, pointless dream. You and I are enemies now. No, even less than that. You tried to murder me, and now you are an obstacle to be removed. I hate you, and even more than that, I hate the Tower of Fangs, and the way it shaped you—shaped us—shaped the events that surrounded me, and in so doing, shaped its own destruction. 

I will pull this place stone from stone before I am done, and use them to build a cairn over the monstrous body of Bloody August. 

It's past time that I ended this foolish little indulgence and began on the next step of my plan. I have time only for plans now, not dreams. Dreams hurt too much when they end, and they always end. 

Always.


End file.
